Oracle, Fujitsu Expand SPARC Server Development Pact

Oracle and Fujitsu, which are competing with IBM, say their jointly developed SPARC64-based Unix systems will offer 15 times the performance within the next three years.

Oracle and Fujitsu are expanding their SPARC-development partnership,
promising performance from the companies' Enterprise M-series servers that will
be 15 times better over the next three years.
The
two companies-which are competing against the likes of IBM
in the high end of the Unix market-also said Feb. 15 that the sales teams for
both can now jointly sell SPARC Enterprise systems, and that Fujitsu signed a
new distribution agreement with Oracle enabling the company to resell and
distribute Oracle products.

"Oracle's
partnership with Fujitsu has never been stronger," Oracle CEO Larry
Ellison said in a statement. "We are entering a new phase with Fujitsu,
aligning our engineering and worldwide distribution efforts with a focus on
high-performance, highly reliable systems."

The
move is the latest by Oracle, which bought Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion a
year ago, as it looks to become a significant rival to IBM
in the high-end system space. Though questions abounded after the deal was
announced about what Oracle would do with Sun's hardware business, Ellison and
other Oracle officials followed through with promises to invest in both the
processor and server technologies.
Ellison
has talked about the winning combination of Oracle software-including the
Solaris operating system it acquired via the Sun deal-and Sun SPARC and x86
hardware, comparing it to how IBM's
optimizes its software on its own hardware. Along with IBM,
Oracle also is competing directly with the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Cisco
Systems and Dell in the converged data-center space.
Along
with the hardware and everything else, Oracle adopted the Fujitsu relationship
in the Sun deal. Several years before the Oracle acquisition, Sun and Fujitsu
had entered into an agreement to jointly develop high-end systems based on
Fujitsu's SPARC64 processing technology for high-end Unix servers. That would
free up Sun to work on its own multi-threaded SPARC technology, as well as on its
efforts around x86 systems.
When
Oracle bought Sun, Ellison said he would leave the midrange and low-end server
businesses to HP and Dell, focusing instead on higher end systems that would
tightly integrate Oracle's business applications with the hardware. Along those
lines, Oracle has created the Exadata Database Machine and the Exalogic
cloud-in-a-box offering.
Oracle
officials have been vocal about their hardware
plans. In August, Oracle officials said they were going to attack the
high-end server space with Oracle-developed SPARC systems that will double in
performance every other year through 2015 and scale to 128 cores. In December,
Oracle announced a new enclosure for Enterprise
M-series servers that will feature logos from both Oracle and Fujitsu.
"I
am very pleased that our partnership with Oracle continues to grow,"
Fujitsu president Masami Yamamoto said in a statement. "We believe our
active partnership with Oracle, in addressing greater sales and services on a
global scale, will produce a richer and more vibrant solution environment for
our joint customers."
Oracle's
moves have caught the attention of its largest competitor. In September 2010-as
controversy swirled around HP and the ousting of its CEO, Mark Hurd-IBM
CEO Sam Palmisano told the Wall Street
Journal that he was less concerned about HP and that it was Oracle
that was now its most formidable opponent. During his tenure, Hurd had cut
too much of HP's R&D budget, Palmisano said. Meanwhile, Oracle was now
competing with IBM not only in software and
services, but-with Sun in the fold-in hardware, too.